This was never intended to be a travelogue. It was always meant to be an account of my constantly changing frames of mind in a country which is not mine, in a city which was a stranger to me. Three months after I first landed in Sydney, quite a few things have changed.
I am no longer a stranger to Sydney. Sydney is no longer a stranger to me.
With this letter, I am ending the series of letters I wrote to people back home who were worried about how I could cope up in the land down under, with no one by my side. There was a point where I was thinking if I was doing the right thing by leaving India at a time where my career was looking up.
On retrospection, I think Sydney is the best move I have made in my life.
Three months down the line, I am used to the city now and I am feeling increasingly at home, but, I do miss India and almost everything about it.
There are many more stories I have to tell, but then I would’ve respected Sachin Tendulkar more had he retired from the game at the right time.
“What’s the logic?” you may ask me, “You aren’t Sachin”.
That’s the whole point. I am not Sachin.
I was amazed to see 130-150 hits on the blog every week, and dumbfounded on seeing that atleast 50 people turned up on Saturdays. It’s both scary and satisfying when so many people display such ardent interest in your life.
I am grateful to everyone who read these letters and told me through numerous comments and emails about how they felt about it. I hope I gave everybody something with every letter.
I had a ball writing for you guys. Hope you enjoyed equally.
Here’s the eagerly anticipated and much talked about letter 8.
Thanks,
NM.
P.S: Please DO NOT leave anonymous comments on this particular post.
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A boy and a girl were sitting in a café one evening. She was dressed in pink, he was wearing white. Drawing a heart with a spoon in the froth of his cappuccino he looked at her. Her brown eyes were pointed towards the overcast sky.
“Do you believe in Love at first sight?” He asked her.
“I don’t believe in love in the first place… leave alone the first sight”, she said, quite matter of factly.
The heart in the cappuccino was now looking like a cloud. She was still looking up in the sky.
“Define love in one word.” He asked next, looking at her, hoping somewhere in his heart that she would look into his eyes.
“Illusion. Love is an illusion. We never love people, we just get used to them.” She answered, not looking at him, even once.
“What would you say if I tell you that I love you?”
She didn’t say a word. He knew she wouldn’t.
He had fallen in love with her. She had gotten used to him.
“You should try writing a novel, Nik. You would make a great novelist” My screenwriting professor said, looking up at me through his black rimmed pair of spectacles, “And this, no matter how beautifully written, doesn’t quite qualify as screenplay” he said, ruffling the piece of paper I had given with his index finger.
When people make complete sense while talking against something we do, our only defense mechanism is a smile, which is a better way of saying, “Yes, I know that I am stupid. Thanks for reaffirming my self-belief.”
I smiled and took back the piece of paper, thanked him and left his cabin only to bump into a visibly frustrated Hasse on the staircase.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her.
“Almost everything…” she said, without wasting even a second, “What’s wrong with you?” she asked.
A bit surprised at her question I just pointed my finger to the professor’s cabin.
Giggling incessantly she said, “Got fucked eh?”
“Kind of… Great way to start a day!” I confessed… “How did you know that something was wrong with me?” I couldn’t control the desire to ask the inevitable question which was the reason for the initial bit of surprise.
“Look at your face..! Listen to your voice!” she said, “Sit outside. I would make us some coffee…”
I didn’t know that my face could give out so much. Or maybe she had started to know me well enough to understand what’s going on in my mind just by looking at my face or by hearing my voice, something that only few people in the world can boast of being able to do. Diptee, Pavan, Niket, DJ, Amol, Amogh, Prasad, Anahita, Priyanka… That’s about it, I guess.
It was quite early in the morning, as we were sitting on the wooden boxes outside school, sipping coffee that she had just made for both of us.
Hasse asked me, “Nik, have you ever truly loved someone?” Now I knew what was wrong with her.
I smiled, looking straight in her blue eyes and I told her something that I hadn’t told, rather confessed to anyone in Sydney till that day. There was something about Hasse that made me trust her, instinctively. She reminded me of people like Pavan, Vivek, Amogh, Bodhi, Niket, Prasad, Sachin Bhai, Vijay Sir, DJ, Sandu, Amol, VD and Tejas… I could just look in her eyes and trust her.
I told her something that made her really, really worried. Hasse was the 7th person on earth to know about the Pretty Girl in Pink.
We studied in the same school, but never really spoke. 5 years after school, I never thought that something like what happened would happen.
One day I just saw a scrap in Pavan’s scrapbook. I recognized the girl instantly, my thoughts transporting me to the school days when Karanjgaokar had told me looking at her, “Fakt Brahman mulich evdhya cute asu shaktat…” (Only Brahmin girls can be this cute) A smile came to my face and I clicked on her profile.
Coincidentally she had checked my profile on the same day. We met online and then started talking. I am a person who chooses who I talk to and who I don’t and it generally takes me a long, long time to get really friendly with anybody.
But something about us just clicked. God bless Orkut.
What happened over the next 1 month is stuff great motion pictures are made of. The tragic part is that my life ended up being a movie.
Maybe the girl in my story was right. Love indeed is an illusion. It’s an illusion which saves us from experiencing the sore truths of realism. Love is surreal, but true.
Hasse listened intently as I spoke. It was one filmmaker listening to another filmmaker talking about a film which happened to be his life.
“Is she crazy?” she asked me, wide eyed and amused at the story she had just heard.
Smiling, I said, “Honey, that’s the way it goes. But every once in a while, it goes the other way too” not even one bit amused that I had put so much of trust in a person who I had hardly known for 5 days.
My first two months stay in Sydney taught me so much about everything. It taught me that I could live anywhere in the world where they make films, I could make friends anywhere. It taught me that there are people in this world who love me unconditionally. It taught me that I possibly have the best set of parents and grandparents in the whole wide world. It taught me that I have the best family anyone can possibly have, people like Anand Dada, Ravi Dada, Sarang, Kiran Dada who selflessly stood by my side, helping me in every possible way to help me reach my dream. It taught me to be humble, something that I had forgotten down the line. It taught me that I was lucky to get all these people who would do anything for me.
But most importantly it taught me that one person can change your life, forever.
“What would you say if I tell you that I love you?”
She didn’t say a word. He knew she wouldn’t.
It always happens, to all of us. Some questions do come like a jolt, when you least expect them to show up. But then, that’s what life does. It often throws weird questions at us. And then it throws people who give us answers, possibly weirder than the questions themselves.
No matter how weird the question or weirder the answers sound, the truth is that all of it does make sense… Some day… Some time.
I knew that my life had changed in three months because of one person. What I didn’t know then was that another life had also changed… because of me.
Friday, May 18, 2007
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Letters from Sydney: Episode 7
Hello All,
Here's letter 7.
And yes, its 7 days to go.
Have a rocking weekend!
Luv,
NM
-----------------------------------
It was almost 1:30 am and it was raining quite hard; my hair and clothes wet, I was looking out of the window. “Sydney weather and life… are both equally unpredictable”, I said to myself, smiling, taking a sip of the hot chocolate I had made for myself after standing alone in the rain for almost 15 minutes. The unpredictability of Sydney weather was bang in front of my eyes, with the thunderstorm which came literally out of nowhere. The unpredictability of life had been in front of my eyes for the past 4 years, with life taking absolutely erratic twists with alarming regularity and spiraling me onto a puzzle of paths of confusion, anguish and conflict which ultimately ended in a pristine road of self-discovery.
My cell-phone rang. I didn’t even have to look at the screen to see who was calling. There are only three people who call me regularly from India, my mom, my dad and well… the person who was calling me just then.
“Guess what..!” she said, sounding tremendously excited, “It’s raining in Pune! And all of us have stepped out of the office and are enjoying! And we plan to go in and have a mug of hot chocolate… Ok… I’ll call you later… was just very happy so thought I would give you a call…”
The conversation was effectively a monologue, the kind of monologues I love hearing to. Raining in Pune and Sydney at the same time can pass off as coincidence. Standing in the rain and hot chocolate was a bit too much to be just, mere coincidence. Coincidences are what have ruled my life so far; whether it was making a conscious decision to join Pune University for engineering; whether it was feeling like writing a script; whether it was asking Pavan and Tejas on one obscure day that I wanted to make a film and both of them agreeing whole heartedly; whether it was finding a boy with a handy cam called Vijay J who I had never even seen and he agreeing to shoot BLACK; whether it was meeting DJ, Nikhil K, Niket, Parag, Amol and all of them working with me with full trust in my capabilities without once thinking that they hadn’t seen my work ever; whether it was my reaching Factory on the same day when Sonal was looking for a writer, whether it was meeting Shin-Shin on Orkut and we striking on this idea of Karma and Konfessions and Sarang jumping in soon after; whether it was looking up on Google for film school and IFSS being the first and last film school I browsed; whether it was me and her looking up each other on the Holy Cross community on Orkut on the same day; both of us deciding to go to Aurangabad on the same day… it was all ruled by coincidences. All the major events in my life had been coincidences. Or were they part of Destiny’s bigger plan, I don’t know. We decided to meet on a Monday, but again, co-incidentally I had to meet the producer of SSV in the morning and she had to go to work in the evening so we decided to meet up on that weekend.
I still remember the day we had first met. I was late as usual and I reached Mc Donalds almost running. There she was, standing, wearing pink and looking extremely pretty. She was typing an sms before she turned back to look at me, smiling. For that one moment, it seemed like time froze.
Freezing in time is one of the most commonly used tools by efficient screenwriters. When we realize that a character is becoming redundant and extremely predictable we know that he is going to kill the script in his own way; sooner or later we decide to freeze the character in time, i.e. we pack him off under mysterious circumstances. This way, the character cannot kill the script but he does make it much more effective. Thinking about this and coincidences, I started typing, Norwik.
“This is a brilliant script”, my professor looked at me and said, “Why are you calling it Norwik though?” he continued glancing across the ten pages of story that I had handed over exactly 22 hours after I had first thought of it.
“Because”, I said, “The lead character is called Norwik”.
He laughed heartily and said, “Yeah, but you can have a much more effective title, don’t you think?”
“I don’t think so, Sir…” I said, in my trademark finishing style and very much to my expectation, he chucked the topic.
“Do you think you should ‘waste’ this script as a film school project..?” he said, not even looking at me.
I didn’t know what to say.
“This is a once in a lifetime script… Develop it… Let’s see where it goes…” He said, judging my confusion.
I knew it all way long that it was once-in-a-lifetime script. What I needed was someone to tell me that it was that damn good.
After all, not every time I write a script with Johhny Depp in mind.
After all, not every time I think that what I am writing can be better than Aparajita.
TO BE CONTINUED.
Here's letter 7.
And yes, its 7 days to go.
Have a rocking weekend!
Luv,
NM
-----------------------------------
It was almost 1:30 am and it was raining quite hard; my hair and clothes wet, I was looking out of the window. “Sydney weather and life… are both equally unpredictable”, I said to myself, smiling, taking a sip of the hot chocolate I had made for myself after standing alone in the rain for almost 15 minutes. The unpredictability of Sydney weather was bang in front of my eyes, with the thunderstorm which came literally out of nowhere. The unpredictability of life had been in front of my eyes for the past 4 years, with life taking absolutely erratic twists with alarming regularity and spiraling me onto a puzzle of paths of confusion, anguish and conflict which ultimately ended in a pristine road of self-discovery.
My cell-phone rang. I didn’t even have to look at the screen to see who was calling. There are only three people who call me regularly from India, my mom, my dad and well… the person who was calling me just then.
“Guess what..!” she said, sounding tremendously excited, “It’s raining in Pune! And all of us have stepped out of the office and are enjoying! And we plan to go in and have a mug of hot chocolate… Ok… I’ll call you later… was just very happy so thought I would give you a call…”
The conversation was effectively a monologue, the kind of monologues I love hearing to. Raining in Pune and Sydney at the same time can pass off as coincidence. Standing in the rain and hot chocolate was a bit too much to be just, mere coincidence. Coincidences are what have ruled my life so far; whether it was making a conscious decision to join Pune University for engineering; whether it was feeling like writing a script; whether it was asking Pavan and Tejas on one obscure day that I wanted to make a film and both of them agreeing whole heartedly; whether it was finding a boy with a handy cam called Vijay J who I had never even seen and he agreeing to shoot BLACK; whether it was meeting DJ, Nikhil K, Niket, Parag, Amol and all of them working with me with full trust in my capabilities without once thinking that they hadn’t seen my work ever; whether it was my reaching Factory on the same day when Sonal was looking for a writer, whether it was meeting Shin-Shin on Orkut and we striking on this idea of Karma and Konfessions and Sarang jumping in soon after; whether it was looking up on Google for film school and IFSS being the first and last film school I browsed; whether it was me and her looking up each other on the Holy Cross community on Orkut on the same day; both of us deciding to go to Aurangabad on the same day… it was all ruled by coincidences. All the major events in my life had been coincidences. Or were they part of Destiny’s bigger plan, I don’t know. We decided to meet on a Monday, but again, co-incidentally I had to meet the producer of SSV in the morning and she had to go to work in the evening so we decided to meet up on that weekend.
I still remember the day we had first met. I was late as usual and I reached Mc Donalds almost running. There she was, standing, wearing pink and looking extremely pretty. She was typing an sms before she turned back to look at me, smiling. For that one moment, it seemed like time froze.
Freezing in time is one of the most commonly used tools by efficient screenwriters. When we realize that a character is becoming redundant and extremely predictable we know that he is going to kill the script in his own way; sooner or later we decide to freeze the character in time, i.e. we pack him off under mysterious circumstances. This way, the character cannot kill the script but he does make it much more effective. Thinking about this and coincidences, I started typing, Norwik.
“This is a brilliant script”, my professor looked at me and said, “Why are you calling it Norwik though?” he continued glancing across the ten pages of story that I had handed over exactly 22 hours after I had first thought of it.
“Because”, I said, “The lead character is called Norwik”.
He laughed heartily and said, “Yeah, but you can have a much more effective title, don’t you think?”
“I don’t think so, Sir…” I said, in my trademark finishing style and very much to my expectation, he chucked the topic.
“Do you think you should ‘waste’ this script as a film school project..?” he said, not even looking at me.
I didn’t know what to say.
“This is a once in a lifetime script… Develop it… Let’s see where it goes…” He said, judging my confusion.
I knew it all way long that it was once-in-a-lifetime script. What I needed was someone to tell me that it was that damn good.
After all, not every time I write a script with Johhny Depp in mind.
After all, not every time I think that what I am writing can be better than Aparajita.
TO BE CONTINUED.
Friday, May 4, 2007
Letters from Sydney: Episode 6
Hello All,
Thank you for the overwhelming response to all the letters. I am touched, I really am. I would like to inform that letters 6 and 7 are quite long and simple in content. There'snot much happening in these letters except for the fact that I am just linking all the time frames which had gone haywire in the previous letters (On purpose, of course).
For those who sense a De Ja Vu while reading some paragraphs, dont worry, some of them were
in the previous letters. Its just linking it all up.
As for the content, its not much happening.
Lull, before the storm I guess.
Wait... For letter 8. I would also like you people to guess what's gonna be the revelation in letter 8. Who do you think is the pretty girl in pink... Tell me... I am eagerly awaiting your comments.
----------------------------------------------
“When the night falls asleep… When all the lights go dim…
When dreams take control of lives… When even saints sin…
Leaving behind a trail of unfinished chores, I keep walking…
Dreaming of another land… of another person… I keep walking…”
I don’t know what prompted me to scribble these lines in my notebook as I sat in the classroom one day. It was quite early and the professor was yet to come. Not many students had arrived either. It was unusually quiet by film school standards. A couple of classmates were listening to Eminem’s Stan, sharing a pair of earphones between them. Vinn, my friend from Malaysia was sketching an animated version of Jodie Foster in his book. It was raining outside, the skyline a shade of dark grey and the sound of water bouncing off the roofs of cars parked right outside the car room dominating the overall soundscape.
I read the lines again, thinking, possibly for the nth time what propelled me into writing them. It was Friday and we were in for a long weekend, with Monday being a public holiday. Heavy rainfall was predicted for the next 2 days. The Sydney weather forecast is quite accurate unlike the ones we have in India. It was possibly the first time in my fifteen days’ stay in Sydney that it was feeling gloomy. The overall ambience was dipped into dullness, nobody being in their best of spirits, everyone thinking of something personal, something sad. People started entering the class with mugs of piping hot coffee in their hands and loads of boredom written wide across their faces.
We all lazed around the classroom; Hasse and Nicolas were playing Tic-Tac-Toe sitting next to me, Vinn was so frustrated that Jodie Foster was now looking like Tom Hanks from Forrest Gump and I was still pondering about what made me write what I had just written. Hasse’s muffled scream broke my thought process; I looked at the two, who were punching each other because of an argument about the rules of Tic-Tac-Toe. Nicolas had supposedly made a three link using a right angle, which Hasse rightly thought, was wrong. As the two continued to abuse each other in Dutch and Spanish respectively, none understanding what the other was saying, our professor entered.
“Guys… you have an off today”, he said without even looking at the class. He, too, was perhaps bogged down by the strange gloom in the air. As everyone was about to jump in excitement and run towards their own houses to catch up on some sleep, he dropped a bomb, something that we least expected to happen on such a screwed up day. “You have to write three movie script ideas. They have to be in by 4:30.” Without even caring to wait to listen to our accusations and abuses, he left. We all looked at each other and the class was boomed with a tremendous echo of the F word.
I stepped out with my mug of coffee. The rain had subsided, the clouds were still there. Hasse and Nicolas were standing outside, arguing about the tic-tac-toe match that had gone painfully haywire. Much to my exasperation, the two were extremely happy and perhaps the only souls in vicinity to be unaffected by the intensely uninspiring weather. Looking at me, they stopped fighting and came near me. Hasse started talking about a black and white film she had seen on DVD the last night. How I was wishing that she hadn’t seen that film. I was so bored that I was actually praying that both of them turn mute for a day. Nicolas who was also not impressed by Hasse’s black and white movie talk changed the topic quickly.
“Nik, you know… I was coming in the train today, I saw this chick… very hot chick… talking to her boyfriend about India…” He said, desperately trying to make Hasse shut up as he continued to speak, “You know what she told him..?”
“How would I know Nic..?” I asked back, very, very, matter of factly.
“That’s true too, how would you know…” Nic said as if he had never heard of the word Sarcasm ever and continued, “She told him… That India is a beautiful country which is located in the middle-east…” Without even waiting for us to react he started rollicking with laughter. His laughter itself was so infectious, that both of us couldn’t stop laughing with him, less on his joke, more on the way he reacted to his own joke.
“And you know what… She was blonde…” He concluded.
On that moment, both Nic and I instinctively looked at Hasse, who adjusted her cap coincidentally just at that moment, making both of us laugh like there was no tomorrow. Embarrassed she looked away.
“I actually cracked a good joke after a long time…” Nicolas continued, making both of us erupt into peels of laughter once more.
“That makes it two good jokes in a line...” he said, I almost rolling on the floor laughing, Hasse laughing too, a bit of embarrassment still visible on her face.
Vinn came out and said, “Guys, up in the theatre in 5… Something important.”
Before we could react, Vinn was in and up the stairs.
“Must be something about the 5 character exercise” Hasse said.
“Maybe” Nic and I agreed in unison. The boredom had gone thanks to Nic’s antics.
Coffee break was over, Thinking about the 5 characters exercise, playing with Hasse’s cap, much to her annoyance, we walked in the lobby, Nicolas gleefully flashing his card at the door to let us in, the Sin City poster greeted us and we walked up the staircase towards the 100 capacity theatre, 15 days after we had first had entered it.
We sat in the theatre when our professor walked in visually worried. He looked at the class and threw the regular smile at us, albeit it didn’t seem genuine this time.
“There’s a problem, Class” he said, looking at all of us.
There was something about the whole of it which made us all get worried. We looked at him and then at each other. No one understanding what to say, how to react. He walked up to his desk, grabbed a glass of water and gulped it down.
“Is the school shutting down?” was the first thought that came to my mind and I realized that I was actually scared to bits at the thought. “Fuck… Fuck… Fuck…” I said to myself, trying to brush the imagination away. I looked around to see that almost everyone was extremely scared. That didn’t come as a surprise especially since all of us were equally imaginative.
The professor then kept down the glass of water and looked up.
“There’s a problem, Class… We have decided to give you guys a welcome party… and I am afraid that there aint enough beer… Who can go with Alex and get a couple of beer crates?” He said and started laughing.
We all joined him. Though I joined the laughter, the thought of the school getting shut down before I finished my course was worrying me. I was literally scared thinking what I would do if I had to go back to India without the degree. I couldn’t leave the degree unfinished; I was scared of such a day. But somewhere I felt nice about going back to India, going back to her. And all of a sudden the lines I had scribbled in the morning made sense to me.
[i]“When the night falls asleep… When all the lights go dim…
When dreams take control of lives… When even saints sin…
Leaving behind a trail of unfinished chores, I keep walking…
Dreaming of another land… of another person… I keep walking…”[/i]
I smiled at the strange bit of intuition I had experienced. I just thought that how would it be to actually see everything that’s going to happen. I just thought about how a person would feel if he comes to know that he’s going to die, and soon.
“I have a friend called Norwik…” I overheard Hasse telling Nic about a Russian friend of hers.
“Norwik…” The name boomed in my ears. “Norwik Dmitri” I said to myself, a smile appearing on my face. I knew I had got my first story idea. What I didn’t know then was that it was going to change my life, forever.
TO BE CONTINUED.
Thank you for the overwhelming response to all the letters. I am touched, I really am. I would like to inform that letters 6 and 7 are quite long and simple in content. There'snot much happening in these letters except for the fact that I am just linking all the time frames which had gone haywire in the previous letters (On purpose, of course).
For those who sense a De Ja Vu while reading some paragraphs, dont worry, some of them were
in the previous letters. Its just linking it all up.
As for the content, its not much happening.
Lull, before the storm I guess.
Wait... For letter 8. I would also like you people to guess what's gonna be the revelation in letter 8. Who do you think is the pretty girl in pink... Tell me... I am eagerly awaiting your comments.
----------------------------------------------
“When the night falls asleep… When all the lights go dim…
When dreams take control of lives… When even saints sin…
Leaving behind a trail of unfinished chores, I keep walking…
Dreaming of another land… of another person… I keep walking…”
I don’t know what prompted me to scribble these lines in my notebook as I sat in the classroom one day. It was quite early and the professor was yet to come. Not many students had arrived either. It was unusually quiet by film school standards. A couple of classmates were listening to Eminem’s Stan, sharing a pair of earphones between them. Vinn, my friend from Malaysia was sketching an animated version of Jodie Foster in his book. It was raining outside, the skyline a shade of dark grey and the sound of water bouncing off the roofs of cars parked right outside the car room dominating the overall soundscape.
I read the lines again, thinking, possibly for the nth time what propelled me into writing them. It was Friday and we were in for a long weekend, with Monday being a public holiday. Heavy rainfall was predicted for the next 2 days. The Sydney weather forecast is quite accurate unlike the ones we have in India. It was possibly the first time in my fifteen days’ stay in Sydney that it was feeling gloomy. The overall ambience was dipped into dullness, nobody being in their best of spirits, everyone thinking of something personal, something sad. People started entering the class with mugs of piping hot coffee in their hands and loads of boredom written wide across their faces.
We all lazed around the classroom; Hasse and Nicolas were playing Tic-Tac-Toe sitting next to me, Vinn was so frustrated that Jodie Foster was now looking like Tom Hanks from Forrest Gump and I was still pondering about what made me write what I had just written. Hasse’s muffled scream broke my thought process; I looked at the two, who were punching each other because of an argument about the rules of Tic-Tac-Toe. Nicolas had supposedly made a three link using a right angle, which Hasse rightly thought, was wrong. As the two continued to abuse each other in Dutch and Spanish respectively, none understanding what the other was saying, our professor entered.
“Guys… you have an off today”, he said without even looking at the class. He, too, was perhaps bogged down by the strange gloom in the air. As everyone was about to jump in excitement and run towards their own houses to catch up on some sleep, he dropped a bomb, something that we least expected to happen on such a screwed up day. “You have to write three movie script ideas. They have to be in by 4:30.” Without even caring to wait to listen to our accusations and abuses, he left. We all looked at each other and the class was boomed with a tremendous echo of the F word.
I stepped out with my mug of coffee. The rain had subsided, the clouds were still there. Hasse and Nicolas were standing outside, arguing about the tic-tac-toe match that had gone painfully haywire. Much to my exasperation, the two were extremely happy and perhaps the only souls in vicinity to be unaffected by the intensely uninspiring weather. Looking at me, they stopped fighting and came near me. Hasse started talking about a black and white film she had seen on DVD the last night. How I was wishing that she hadn’t seen that film. I was so bored that I was actually praying that both of them turn mute for a day. Nicolas who was also not impressed by Hasse’s black and white movie talk changed the topic quickly.
“Nik, you know… I was coming in the train today, I saw this chick… very hot chick… talking to her boyfriend about India…” He said, desperately trying to make Hasse shut up as he continued to speak, “You know what she told him..?”
“How would I know Nic..?” I asked back, very, very, matter of factly.
“That’s true too, how would you know…” Nic said as if he had never heard of the word Sarcasm ever and continued, “She told him… That India is a beautiful country which is located in the middle-east…” Without even waiting for us to react he started rollicking with laughter. His laughter itself was so infectious, that both of us couldn’t stop laughing with him, less on his joke, more on the way he reacted to his own joke.
“And you know what… She was blonde…” He concluded.
On that moment, both Nic and I instinctively looked at Hasse, who adjusted her cap coincidentally just at that moment, making both of us laugh like there was no tomorrow. Embarrassed she looked away.
“I actually cracked a good joke after a long time…” Nicolas continued, making both of us erupt into peels of laughter once more.
“That makes it two good jokes in a line...” he said, I almost rolling on the floor laughing, Hasse laughing too, a bit of embarrassment still visible on her face.
Vinn came out and said, “Guys, up in the theatre in 5… Something important.”
Before we could react, Vinn was in and up the stairs.
“Must be something about the 5 character exercise” Hasse said.
“Maybe” Nic and I agreed in unison. The boredom had gone thanks to Nic’s antics.
Coffee break was over, Thinking about the 5 characters exercise, playing with Hasse’s cap, much to her annoyance, we walked in the lobby, Nicolas gleefully flashing his card at the door to let us in, the Sin City poster greeted us and we walked up the staircase towards the 100 capacity theatre, 15 days after we had first had entered it.
We sat in the theatre when our professor walked in visually worried. He looked at the class and threw the regular smile at us, albeit it didn’t seem genuine this time.
“There’s a problem, Class” he said, looking at all of us.
There was something about the whole of it which made us all get worried. We looked at him and then at each other. No one understanding what to say, how to react. He walked up to his desk, grabbed a glass of water and gulped it down.
“Is the school shutting down?” was the first thought that came to my mind and I realized that I was actually scared to bits at the thought. “Fuck… Fuck… Fuck…” I said to myself, trying to brush the imagination away. I looked around to see that almost everyone was extremely scared. That didn’t come as a surprise especially since all of us were equally imaginative.
The professor then kept down the glass of water and looked up.
“There’s a problem, Class… We have decided to give you guys a welcome party… and I am afraid that there aint enough beer… Who can go with Alex and get a couple of beer crates?” He said and started laughing.
We all joined him. Though I joined the laughter, the thought of the school getting shut down before I finished my course was worrying me. I was literally scared thinking what I would do if I had to go back to India without the degree. I couldn’t leave the degree unfinished; I was scared of such a day. But somewhere I felt nice about going back to India, going back to her. And all of a sudden the lines I had scribbled in the morning made sense to me.
[i]“When the night falls asleep… When all the lights go dim…
When dreams take control of lives… When even saints sin…
Leaving behind a trail of unfinished chores, I keep walking…
Dreaming of another land… of another person… I keep walking…”[/i]
I smiled at the strange bit of intuition I had experienced. I just thought that how would it be to actually see everything that’s going to happen. I just thought about how a person would feel if he comes to know that he’s going to die, and soon.
“I have a friend called Norwik…” I overheard Hasse telling Nic about a Russian friend of hers.
“Norwik…” The name boomed in my ears. “Norwik Dmitri” I said to myself, a smile appearing on my face. I knew I had got my first story idea. What I didn’t know then was that it was going to change my life, forever.
TO BE CONTINUED.
Saturday, April 28, 2007
For you, Bro
I always held a grudge against God. That is a long time back, when I believed in the concept of Him; He never gave me a real brother or sister. I was a kid when I held that complaint. Almost 15 years from then, I now know why I never had a real brother or sister. Looking at Sarang and Sayali, who are technically my cousins, but are much more to me than real siblings. We share a terrific chemistry and I would never refer to them as my cousins and vice versa.
Sarang and I have been brothers, as real as real can be. Sharing similar passions but strikingly different mindsets, when it’s the two of us, we don’t need anyone else. We can stay alone for days and I am pretty sure that we would not get bored, except for when he plays the damned flute.
The last three years changed the entire dynamics of our relationship, we becoming more of close friends than brothers. Sharing woes of his non existent and my constantly changing love lives, arguing about films, reading and analyzing each other’s writings, commenting on almost everyone in our ultra extended family, joking about the most serious of issues, trying to find a way to smile in everything we did, in everything we didn’t do, supporting each other in everything just because we know that no one else can understand our school of thought, but for the two of us.
Having seen so many ups and downs in our lives, Sarang and I have just gotten used to laughing everything off and making others laugh everything off as well.
This is to the only guy I didn’t hug before leaving India, because had I done that, it would have been the only time I would have broken down. This is to the guy who is the person I consider to be the closest to me, the only one who can enter any territory of my highly secretive-for-others-life just because there are no uncharted areas for him. This is to the guy who can easily claim to know EVERYTHING about me. This is to the guy who easily has the best sense of humor in the world. This is to the guy who is easily the most emotional person I have ever known. This is to the guy who has created a breathtaking and sensational world of Tushkrum, looking at it with his eyes closed, hoping sincerely that someday he gets to see it with open eyes as well. This is to the guy who I know would never walk out on me. This is to the guy who means the world to me. This is to the guy who is immensely loved by almost everyone he knows.
This is to the guy who turned 27 today.
This is the guy who is going to be one of the best fantasy-fiction authors in history by the time he turns 29.
This is to the spirit, of making dreams come true, against all odds.
This is to the spirit of standing by your own ground, morals and ambitions no matter what the world says about you, about your dreams, about your ambitions.
This is for the author of The Castle of Tushkrum.
This is for the best friend, the best brother and the best human being.
This is for my brother, Sarang.
Happy Birthday Bro. I love you.
------------------------------------
You can read the 5th letter right after this post.
Thanks a lot.
NM
Letters from Sydney: Episode 5
“Why do you think you want to be a director?” my Head of school had asked me in the telephonic interview, way back in June. Without wasting a moment I had told him, “Because… I don’t think I can do anything else in life.” I could hear him laugh out loud over the phone. Reclining in the maroon chair in my room in the Pune house I had wondered why he had laughed like that then.
10 months after that interview, sitting on a bench in the small park right opposite my house in Sydney, I found the answer. Films are not only about talent, they are essentially about passion. They have to run in your blood; you have to be excited about the minutest of cinematic detail, thrilled to bits every time the lights go out in a cinema hall and random images flicker across the silver screen, angry as hell every time you miss even 2 minutes of a film because of some idiotic friend turning up late for a film. It’s the passion only a few possess. For most people, films are a medium of entertainment, a sheer way to pass time. For some people like me, films are life, a way to live through time. That’s the common thing between me and my head of school and most other students in school; we can’t imagine ourselves doing anything else in life. No wonder he laughed, maybe even he had given the same answer to the same question when he got interviewed for film school.
I entered the house, entirely wet from one of those highly unpredictable Sydney downpours. Sac greeted me at the door, wagging his tail against the floor so feverishly that it could put any of the PMC sweepers to shame. For those of you who don’t know, PMC is Pune Municipal Corporation and the PMC sweepers are guys who get paid for not sweeping the roads. Patting his head I asked Sac if David and Natalie were at home. He licked my right hand right from wrist to the tip of my fingers, thereby indicating that neither of them was home and that he was extremely bored of the unasked for solitude.
“Alone for dinner, again” I thought aloud as I walked up the staircase and in my room. Looking around the space that would make any normal human claustrophobic, I took my shoes off and jumped on the bed. It was when I jumped that I realized that I shouldn’t have jumped after a few very angry ligaments in my shoulder and back screamed in agony, in unison. It was a result of a crazy film shoot that I had returned from. It was just the 3rd day in school and we were asked to do a 24 hour film shoot. It basically meant that we had to write, shoot and edit a film in 24 hours.
“Nik! The boom’s in shot”, the DoP shouted. I lowered the boom, adjusted my headphones checked with the DoP if the frame was clear and got ready for the director’s orders. In school, we are divided into teams of 5 for every project and each of us performs a different role on different projects. I wasn’t directing the first film we made at film school. I had written it and was in charge of sound. Looking at the script in the lead actor’s hand, I smiled and thought about the Herculean effort that had gone into penning it.
It was a crazy, crazy project right from the beginning. I was asked to write a script about a guy who is trying to kill himself. I worked very hard on it and wrote a decent looking 10 min script in 3 odd hours. My professor came in, praised the script like it was the best thing written in ages, and then, totally out of the blue threw a bombshell on me and my team. He asked me to rewrite the whole script without dialogue and replace the indoor location with an outdoor one, albeit without changing the basic story. Almost on a verge of a nervous breakdown, our entire crew screamed at the professor asking him to explain the reason behind such a mean and inhuman demand. He smiled and said, “That’s what happens on a film set.”
Cursing the day I chose to join IFSS, I got down to writing the version 2 of the same script. We had 18 hours left to shoot and cut the film. It all depended on how quickly I could come up with the new script. Taking ideas from everyone in the team and after gulping down almost 10 mugs of black coffee, I did the whole script in 90 minutes flat and got it approved from the professor. Grabbing a few sandwiches we sat in a mate’s car and headed towards the location to shoot our first film at film school. The car was zooming along the freeway, reminding me of the Mumbai-Pune expressway, of the last time I traveled on it, while I went to the airport to catch the flight to Sydney. I was sitting next to the cab driver when my mobile rang. It was a sms that read, “You know something, Nikhil, I am really gonna miss you.” I looked back at Mom and Dad, thinking that I should tell them everything, but then I looked at the sms once again, smiled and preferred looking out of the window.
“Nik! What the f*** are you doing? The boom’s in shot again… that too for the second time” my thoughts were disturbed by my DoP’s voice.
“I am sorry”, I said adjusting the boom, “I just had gone… Some place else.”
The shoot went on fine. We managed to shoot and edit the film in 22 hours, our group finishing second only to Hasse’s group. Extremely tired with the day’s shoot Hasse and I sat at the wooden boxes for the first time ever, our legs stretched, looking up at the skies crowded with dark and rain filled clouds.
“There’s something about Sydney that makes me hate it”, she said, looking up at the clouds.
“That’s quite an extreme statement, don’t you think?” I asked her as she continued looking up.
“I guess it is. The something about Sydney that makes me hate it is something it doesn’t have.” She said, looking straight at me.
Just then it started raining, all of a sudden. It was one of those unexpected Sydney downpours. Hasse ran for her umbrella, offered me an umbrella walk till my place which I rejected.
“I would rather get wet… I love the rain… I just hope there’s someone at home who I can have dinner with… Don’t feel like eating alone tonight.” I said, bid her adieu and ran towards 66-A after a tough day’s shoot thinking about the thing about something that made her hate Sydney.
It didn’t make any sense to me then. Now after what seems to be an eternity after that evening, with the sitting on wooden boxes after class becoming a tradition for both of us, it makes total sense. She was so right when she said that. She hates Sydney because of something it doesn’t have… someone it doesn’t have. And when that made sense I realized that I hate Sydney too, for something that it doesn’t have… someone it doesn’t have.
TO BE CONTINUED
10 months after that interview, sitting on a bench in the small park right opposite my house in Sydney, I found the answer. Films are not only about talent, they are essentially about passion. They have to run in your blood; you have to be excited about the minutest of cinematic detail, thrilled to bits every time the lights go out in a cinema hall and random images flicker across the silver screen, angry as hell every time you miss even 2 minutes of a film because of some idiotic friend turning up late for a film. It’s the passion only a few possess. For most people, films are a medium of entertainment, a sheer way to pass time. For some people like me, films are life, a way to live through time. That’s the common thing between me and my head of school and most other students in school; we can’t imagine ourselves doing anything else in life. No wonder he laughed, maybe even he had given the same answer to the same question when he got interviewed for film school.
I entered the house, entirely wet from one of those highly unpredictable Sydney downpours. Sac greeted me at the door, wagging his tail against the floor so feverishly that it could put any of the PMC sweepers to shame. For those of you who don’t know, PMC is Pune Municipal Corporation and the PMC sweepers are guys who get paid for not sweeping the roads. Patting his head I asked Sac if David and Natalie were at home. He licked my right hand right from wrist to the tip of my fingers, thereby indicating that neither of them was home and that he was extremely bored of the unasked for solitude.
“Alone for dinner, again” I thought aloud as I walked up the staircase and in my room. Looking around the space that would make any normal human claustrophobic, I took my shoes off and jumped on the bed. It was when I jumped that I realized that I shouldn’t have jumped after a few very angry ligaments in my shoulder and back screamed in agony, in unison. It was a result of a crazy film shoot that I had returned from. It was just the 3rd day in school and we were asked to do a 24 hour film shoot. It basically meant that we had to write, shoot and edit a film in 24 hours.
“Nik! The boom’s in shot”, the DoP shouted. I lowered the boom, adjusted my headphones checked with the DoP if the frame was clear and got ready for the director’s orders. In school, we are divided into teams of 5 for every project and each of us performs a different role on different projects. I wasn’t directing the first film we made at film school. I had written it and was in charge of sound. Looking at the script in the lead actor’s hand, I smiled and thought about the Herculean effort that had gone into penning it.
It was a crazy, crazy project right from the beginning. I was asked to write a script about a guy who is trying to kill himself. I worked very hard on it and wrote a decent looking 10 min script in 3 odd hours. My professor came in, praised the script like it was the best thing written in ages, and then, totally out of the blue threw a bombshell on me and my team. He asked me to rewrite the whole script without dialogue and replace the indoor location with an outdoor one, albeit without changing the basic story. Almost on a verge of a nervous breakdown, our entire crew screamed at the professor asking him to explain the reason behind such a mean and inhuman demand. He smiled and said, “That’s what happens on a film set.”
Cursing the day I chose to join IFSS, I got down to writing the version 2 of the same script. We had 18 hours left to shoot and cut the film. It all depended on how quickly I could come up with the new script. Taking ideas from everyone in the team and after gulping down almost 10 mugs of black coffee, I did the whole script in 90 minutes flat and got it approved from the professor. Grabbing a few sandwiches we sat in a mate’s car and headed towards the location to shoot our first film at film school. The car was zooming along the freeway, reminding me of the Mumbai-Pune expressway, of the last time I traveled on it, while I went to the airport to catch the flight to Sydney. I was sitting next to the cab driver when my mobile rang. It was a sms that read, “You know something, Nikhil, I am really gonna miss you.” I looked back at Mom and Dad, thinking that I should tell them everything, but then I looked at the sms once again, smiled and preferred looking out of the window.
“Nik! What the f*** are you doing? The boom’s in shot again… that too for the second time” my thoughts were disturbed by my DoP’s voice.
“I am sorry”, I said adjusting the boom, “I just had gone… Some place else.”
The shoot went on fine. We managed to shoot and edit the film in 22 hours, our group finishing second only to Hasse’s group. Extremely tired with the day’s shoot Hasse and I sat at the wooden boxes for the first time ever, our legs stretched, looking up at the skies crowded with dark and rain filled clouds.
“There’s something about Sydney that makes me hate it”, she said, looking up at the clouds.
“That’s quite an extreme statement, don’t you think?” I asked her as she continued looking up.
“I guess it is. The something about Sydney that makes me hate it is something it doesn’t have.” She said, looking straight at me.
Just then it started raining, all of a sudden. It was one of those unexpected Sydney downpours. Hasse ran for her umbrella, offered me an umbrella walk till my place which I rejected.
“I would rather get wet… I love the rain… I just hope there’s someone at home who I can have dinner with… Don’t feel like eating alone tonight.” I said, bid her adieu and ran towards 66-A after a tough day’s shoot thinking about the thing about something that made her hate Sydney.
It didn’t make any sense to me then. Now after what seems to be an eternity after that evening, with the sitting on wooden boxes after class becoming a tradition for both of us, it makes total sense. She was so right when she said that. She hates Sydney because of something it doesn’t have… someone it doesn’t have. And when that made sense I realized that I hate Sydney too, for something that it doesn’t have… someone it doesn’t have.
TO BE CONTINUED
Friday, April 20, 2007
Letters from Sydney: Episode 4
Hello All,
Thanks for the fantastic response to all the letters till now. From here on the letters are going to be a bit more film based and reflective of my constant changing mind-frames in the Land down under. You might feel weird time leaps as you read these, but by the time I reach the finale of this series, all of it would make sense.
----------------------------------------------------------------
“Rule 1 of film making” my professor’s sound boomed across the lengths and breadths of the black n white lecture room in the basement, “Paper is cheaper than film. Do you guys get what I said?” he asked, drawing a circle on the white board with a black marker. Not many of us understood as we reclined in the chairs looking at the professor draw a film reel from the circle.
I, for starters, was one of the very few guys who understood exactly what he meant. Film stock, celluloid as it is popularly known, is extremely costly, responsible for almost 60% of any film’s production budget. In a filmmaker’s language it’s essentially referred to as film or stock. When you go out to shoot a film, you have to be so well prepared, all your shots storyboarded, all sequences planned, each and every minor detail of production worked out just to the T, so that you can shoot in a XYZ amount of stock, keeping your budget on track, your film on schedule. Whatever experimentation you do, keep it to paper, so that you don’t screw up on film. That’s why, Paper’s cheaper than film.
It had been almost a week since school had started, I being exposed to an entirely new world, a world that had only one word which it followed, with passion that reached heights of fanaticism, the word being Cinema. The class is a brilliant blend of students from all over the world. Perhaps, for the first time in my life my eyes opened to a gamut so wide of talent, creativity. People who are as crazy as I am, leaving jobs, medical studies and well-settled careers just for the sake of this absolutely insane passion for films. There are a few genuinely talented guys who are at a similar creative level as mine while the others are technically sound, with everyone almost having an area of specialization. I couldn’t believe the kind of boost my mind received when I entered this environment where all we talk, eat, drink and think is films. Imagine a world where all we do is talk about Tarkowski, Antonioni, Scorsese, Tarantino, Noir cinema, Bazz Luhrmenn’s version of Romeo and Juliet, How Jaws 3 is the worst film ever, How Bram Stocker’s Dracula ridicules the novel, How Ashutosh Gowariker made a brilliant film out of a very simple story in Lagaan and How Russian and French films are inspired from the socio-political circumstances in those particular countries. The list is endless and trust me, it’s incredibly exciting.
All of us have our own pros and cons, some of us being exceptional screenwriters, some having a striking acumen for cinematography, some are master editors while some would make brilliant producers. The surprising and best part of the whole deal is that it’s all a highly creative learning process fuelled with stressful but fruitful brainstorming sessions and not a place that houses competition and jealousy.
The first week was quite tough and stressful, we were made to work on mad, mad deadlines, finish 3 scripts by 1700 hrs. or write, shoot and edit a film in 24 hours. It was crazy, but hell yeah it was fun.
Thinking about all this and things from back home, I was missing Pune more than anything else. I am so used to the city; I love it in spite of all the potholes and very, polluted air. There are days when I look at a clean Sydney road and think that these guys are missing having potholes on the road, they are missing out on the fun of abusing the government for not paying attention to the road. There are days when I look at a train in Sydney as it zooms along the Harbor Bridge, that these people in this city are missing out on standing in a crowded, hot and sweaty Mumbai local. There are days when I look at people in this city and think that these people are missing out on so much, they are missing out on a totally different flavor of life, which only India can offer.
As I walk alone along the fantastic City roads, looking at the disciplined traffic, people who cross roads only when the walking signal goes green, people who look extremely happy all the time I just think that what I miss the most about India is not my friends or family. What I miss the most is the little imperfections in India which make India, India. I just smile to myself as I roam around the city, alone, thinking that there’s a different kind of fun associated in breaking a signal or running across a packed-with-traffic road. The kind of fun that Sydneyites can never, never experience. The kind of fun that Indians can never, never forget.
It was quite late at night. Almost 3 a.m. I had just decided to catch a few winks because the next day was going to be tough. As I reclined and closed my eyes, I fell asleep immediately. I must’ve been asleep for half an hour when my phone rang.
‘Private Number’ flashed on my mobile making me understand that someone from India was calling. I answered, saying a hello, trying to sound as not-sleepy as possible.
“I woke you up. Right?” said the voice from the other side.
“No you didn’t” I said, recognizing her instantly, “I was just lying down”, crossing my fingers as I lied to her, “What makes you call at this hour?”
“Nothing… I just felt like talking to you” the saccharine voice confided with heart-melting innocence.
Unable to control the Hassesque 300 watt smile, I said, “Talk, then.”
It was the voice which had become my support system over the past few months, being with me through the ‘n’ number of problems I faced in almost everything. But more importantly it was the voice which helped me stay unfazed like a rock in an alien city.
She wasn’t my girlfriend. I wasn’t seeing her. We never dated. When I told David, Natalie and most friends in my class that I didn’t have a girlfriend, I wasn’t lying.
Early morning one day, as we were sitting on the wooden boxes outside school, sipping coffee that she had just made for both of us, Hasse asked me, “Nik, have you ever truly loved someone?”
I smiled, looking straight in her blue eyes and I told her something that I hadn’t told, rather confessed to anyone in Sydney till that day. There was something about Hasse that made me trust her, instinctively. She reminded me of people like Pavan, Vivek, Amogh, Bodhi, Prasad, Sachin Bhai, Vijay Sir, DJ, Sandu, Amol, VD and Tejas… I could just look in her eyes and trust her.
I told her something that made her really, really worried. Hasse was the 7th person on earth to know about the Pretty Girl in Pink
“Is she crazy?” she asked me, wide eyed and amused at the story she had just heard.
Remembering that line from True Romance, Smiling, I said, “Honey, that’s the way it goes. But every once in a while, it goes the other way too” not even one bit amused that I had put so much of trust in a person who I had hardly known for 5 days.
When people tell you about their love lives, they like us. When they tell us about the tragedies of their love lives, they trust us.
TO BE CONTINUED
Thanks for the fantastic response to all the letters till now. From here on the letters are going to be a bit more film based and reflective of my constant changing mind-frames in the Land down under. You might feel weird time leaps as you read these, but by the time I reach the finale of this series, all of it would make sense.
----------------------------------------------------------------
“Rule 1 of film making” my professor’s sound boomed across the lengths and breadths of the black n white lecture room in the basement, “Paper is cheaper than film. Do you guys get what I said?” he asked, drawing a circle on the white board with a black marker. Not many of us understood as we reclined in the chairs looking at the professor draw a film reel from the circle.
I, for starters, was one of the very few guys who understood exactly what he meant. Film stock, celluloid as it is popularly known, is extremely costly, responsible for almost 60% of any film’s production budget. In a filmmaker’s language it’s essentially referred to as film or stock. When you go out to shoot a film, you have to be so well prepared, all your shots storyboarded, all sequences planned, each and every minor detail of production worked out just to the T, so that you can shoot in a XYZ amount of stock, keeping your budget on track, your film on schedule. Whatever experimentation you do, keep it to paper, so that you don’t screw up on film. That’s why, Paper’s cheaper than film.
It had been almost a week since school had started, I being exposed to an entirely new world, a world that had only one word which it followed, with passion that reached heights of fanaticism, the word being Cinema. The class is a brilliant blend of students from all over the world. Perhaps, for the first time in my life my eyes opened to a gamut so wide of talent, creativity. People who are as crazy as I am, leaving jobs, medical studies and well-settled careers just for the sake of this absolutely insane passion for films. There are a few genuinely talented guys who are at a similar creative level as mine while the others are technically sound, with everyone almost having an area of specialization. I couldn’t believe the kind of boost my mind received when I entered this environment where all we talk, eat, drink and think is films. Imagine a world where all we do is talk about Tarkowski, Antonioni, Scorsese, Tarantino, Noir cinema, Bazz Luhrmenn’s version of Romeo and Juliet, How Jaws 3 is the worst film ever, How Bram Stocker’s Dracula ridicules the novel, How Ashutosh Gowariker made a brilliant film out of a very simple story in Lagaan and How Russian and French films are inspired from the socio-political circumstances in those particular countries. The list is endless and trust me, it’s incredibly exciting.
All of us have our own pros and cons, some of us being exceptional screenwriters, some having a striking acumen for cinematography, some are master editors while some would make brilliant producers. The surprising and best part of the whole deal is that it’s all a highly creative learning process fuelled with stressful but fruitful brainstorming sessions and not a place that houses competition and jealousy.
The first week was quite tough and stressful, we were made to work on mad, mad deadlines, finish 3 scripts by 1700 hrs. or write, shoot and edit a film in 24 hours. It was crazy, but hell yeah it was fun.
Thinking about all this and things from back home, I was missing Pune more than anything else. I am so used to the city; I love it in spite of all the potholes and very, polluted air. There are days when I look at a clean Sydney road and think that these guys are missing having potholes on the road, they are missing out on the fun of abusing the government for not paying attention to the road. There are days when I look at a train in Sydney as it zooms along the Harbor Bridge, that these people in this city are missing out on standing in a crowded, hot and sweaty Mumbai local. There are days when I look at people in this city and think that these people are missing out on so much, they are missing out on a totally different flavor of life, which only India can offer.
As I walk alone along the fantastic City roads, looking at the disciplined traffic, people who cross roads only when the walking signal goes green, people who look extremely happy all the time I just think that what I miss the most about India is not my friends or family. What I miss the most is the little imperfections in India which make India, India. I just smile to myself as I roam around the city, alone, thinking that there’s a different kind of fun associated in breaking a signal or running across a packed-with-traffic road. The kind of fun that Sydneyites can never, never experience. The kind of fun that Indians can never, never forget.
It was quite late at night. Almost 3 a.m. I had just decided to catch a few winks because the next day was going to be tough. As I reclined and closed my eyes, I fell asleep immediately. I must’ve been asleep for half an hour when my phone rang.
‘Private Number’ flashed on my mobile making me understand that someone from India was calling. I answered, saying a hello, trying to sound as not-sleepy as possible.
“I woke you up. Right?” said the voice from the other side.
“No you didn’t” I said, recognizing her instantly, “I was just lying down”, crossing my fingers as I lied to her, “What makes you call at this hour?”
“Nothing… I just felt like talking to you” the saccharine voice confided with heart-melting innocence.
Unable to control the Hassesque 300 watt smile, I said, “Talk, then.”
It was the voice which had become my support system over the past few months, being with me through the ‘n’ number of problems I faced in almost everything. But more importantly it was the voice which helped me stay unfazed like a rock in an alien city.
She wasn’t my girlfriend. I wasn’t seeing her. We never dated. When I told David, Natalie and most friends in my class that I didn’t have a girlfriend, I wasn’t lying.
Early morning one day, as we were sitting on the wooden boxes outside school, sipping coffee that she had just made for both of us, Hasse asked me, “Nik, have you ever truly loved someone?”
I smiled, looking straight in her blue eyes and I told her something that I hadn’t told, rather confessed to anyone in Sydney till that day. There was something about Hasse that made me trust her, instinctively. She reminded me of people like Pavan, Vivek, Amogh, Bodhi, Prasad, Sachin Bhai, Vijay Sir, DJ, Sandu, Amol, VD and Tejas… I could just look in her eyes and trust her.
I told her something that made her really, really worried. Hasse was the 7th person on earth to know about the Pretty Girl in Pink
“Is she crazy?” she asked me, wide eyed and amused at the story she had just heard.
Remembering that line from True Romance, Smiling, I said, “Honey, that’s the way it goes. But every once in a while, it goes the other way too” not even one bit amused that I had put so much of trust in a person who I had hardly known for 5 days.
When people tell you about their love lives, they like us. When they tell us about the tragedies of their love lives, they trust us.
TO BE CONTINUED
Friday, April 13, 2007
Letters from Sydney: Episode 3
Hello All,
Here's letter 3.
Still sincerely hoping that you like readin em...
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Film School is like a film set. It’s constantly buzzing with activity, people screaming, shouting at each other, creativity oozing out of each pore of the walls, out of each cell in your brain. It’s a feeling I can’t really put in words, when people are just yelling your name, when you direct, everyone from the gaffer to the grip, from the 1st AD to the DoP, from the spot boy to the focus puller; when everyone wants a piece of you, of your brain, of the thing in you which made you director. You need to know very well, in fact more than just bloody very well, what you want from who, how you want to frame a particular shot, how much time you have to shoot it, how much stock you have to shoot it, what exactly you want the DoP to do, how exactly you want your actors to emote. You should be prepared and you shoot be prepared like what you are shooting would perhaps be the last thing you are shooting.
This is what The International Film School of Sydney taught me by the end of the second week. We hadn’t shot on film yet, but our professors made sure that we knew all that we needed to know. The kind of scripts we were made to write, all of us were made to attend an acting workshop, framing, mise-en-scene and what not, the first two weeks packed in so much that people were almost getting floored by the indefinable stress levels.
Picture this: My screenwriting professor, a true genius in any sense of the word, asked us very casually to write down the most intriguing, the most impacting, the most loved, the most weird and etc. characters from our own life. I personally wrote down the characters of Ramgopal Verma, The Pretty Girl in Pink, Pavan, My dad, Shahrukh Khan along with a few others.
Cut to two days later, when all of us had forgotten about the characters we had sketched, the same professor asked us to write down ‘one illegal, irrational and crazy thing we would have wanted to do’. I personally wrote down, for reasons still unknown to me, to perform a major international drug heist. I was in the shock of my life when he then asked us to write a movie script about this crazy, irrational and illegal thing I wanted to do by taking 5 characters from the ones I had written before, making them do the heist for me.
Agape and astonished, I looked at the note-book in front of me to check the toughest creative challenge I had faced in my life: To make my dad, The Pretty Girl in Pink, Pavan, Ramgopal Verma and SRK to perform an international drug heist, albeit without getting caught.
I was quite worried about how I would get all these people together in the first place. Making them do an international drug heist without getting caught was an altogether different issue. But my professor told me just one thing, which I think is going to be my mantra for life;
He said, “Nikhil, 5 people, no matter how different they are, can always come together and do any damn thing you want them to do… you know why?”
I threw an I-am-so-frustrated-I-can’t-think glance at him.
Understanding my glance to the T, he smiled and took a swig of his coffee, he said, “Because you are a writer… and you are fuckin good one.”
Raising my mug of coffee in anticipation to the words of praise, I took just the bit of it that I had to take, “I was a writer… and I could make my characters do whatever I wanted them to.”
When people say something, a bit of it is the truth, the other bit is what ‘can be’ the truth. The same thing applied to my professor’s sentence. Some of it was true; some of it could be true.
Coffee break was over, Thinking about the 5 characters exercise, playing with Hasse’s cap, much to her annoyance, we walked in the lobby, Nicolas gleefully flashing his card at the door to let us in, the Sin City poster greeted us and we walked up the staircase towards the 100 capacity theatre, 15 days after we had first had entered it.
Splashing water with my Nike shoes, I remember running towards the school, the raindrops bouncing off my red windcheater. “I am 22 and am going back to school”, I laughed at the contradiction, running as fast as I could, ensuring that I didn’t get late for the 9 a.m. reporting time. I reached the school, breathing heavily, I bent down to look at the school building through the old-tree-arch, could see a couple of Japanese students sipping coffee standing outside, another student, perhaps an Australian smoking. Wiping a bit of water of my hair with the back of my hand, pulling my wet hair back, taking the jacket off, I walked through the pathway, smiling at the three, who obligingly smiled back. They asked me if I was a first tier student, to which I said yes, introducing them to me and vice versa, one of them flashed his card at the door, unlocking it and letting me in.
As I entered, I could see a flock of equally nervous students sitting around the lounge area, some making coffee, some reading newspapers, some looking here n there and some just looking at me, perhaps because I was the latest entry in the lot. Smiling at whoever I liked on instinct, I found myself a place on a couch, right under the Sin City poster. I turned back and was looking at it when I could feel a cold hand on my shoulder. I turned back to see the cutest girl I had ever seen, correction: the second cutest girl I had ever seen, a mop of curly blonde hair on her small, squarish round face, a smile that illuminated the entire room, in a blue-black striped T-Shirt and a pair of denims quite same to the shade I was wearing. I looked at her, almost breaking into a 400 watt smile, inspired because of her equally powerful smile, before I could speak, she spoke.
“Heeeylo!!! I am Hasse, from Holland”. She smiled again, the moment the sentence was over.
“Hi”, I said, still pondering over how she could smile so genuinely, “I am Nikhil, from India”
“Oh!” she smiled, wider this time, “It’s colder in India, aint it?”
“Not at this time of the year”, I said matter of factly, “It’s quite warmer and nicer”.
“Is it?” she enquired, charged full on with curiosity, “Even Holland has better weather…” she sounded terribly homesick for those two split seconds.
Before I could say anything, we were asked to come up to the theatre space for our induction. Hasse and I started walking upstairs, the others following us. I knew at that moment that Dutch people are extremely warm and friendly. What I didn’t know then was that one of them was going to be one of my best friends and that too, for a lifetime.
TO BE CONTINUED
Here's letter 3.
Still sincerely hoping that you like readin em...
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Film School is like a film set. It’s constantly buzzing with activity, people screaming, shouting at each other, creativity oozing out of each pore of the walls, out of each cell in your brain. It’s a feeling I can’t really put in words, when people are just yelling your name, when you direct, everyone from the gaffer to the grip, from the 1st AD to the DoP, from the spot boy to the focus puller; when everyone wants a piece of you, of your brain, of the thing in you which made you director. You need to know very well, in fact more than just bloody very well, what you want from who, how you want to frame a particular shot, how much time you have to shoot it, how much stock you have to shoot it, what exactly you want the DoP to do, how exactly you want your actors to emote. You should be prepared and you shoot be prepared like what you are shooting would perhaps be the last thing you are shooting.
This is what The International Film School of Sydney taught me by the end of the second week. We hadn’t shot on film yet, but our professors made sure that we knew all that we needed to know. The kind of scripts we were made to write, all of us were made to attend an acting workshop, framing, mise-en-scene and what not, the first two weeks packed in so much that people were almost getting floored by the indefinable stress levels.
Picture this: My screenwriting professor, a true genius in any sense of the word, asked us very casually to write down the most intriguing, the most impacting, the most loved, the most weird and etc. characters from our own life. I personally wrote down the characters of Ramgopal Verma, The Pretty Girl in Pink, Pavan, My dad, Shahrukh Khan along with a few others.
Cut to two days later, when all of us had forgotten about the characters we had sketched, the same professor asked us to write down ‘one illegal, irrational and crazy thing we would have wanted to do’. I personally wrote down, for reasons still unknown to me, to perform a major international drug heist. I was in the shock of my life when he then asked us to write a movie script about this crazy, irrational and illegal thing I wanted to do by taking 5 characters from the ones I had written before, making them do the heist for me.
Agape and astonished, I looked at the note-book in front of me to check the toughest creative challenge I had faced in my life: To make my dad, The Pretty Girl in Pink, Pavan, Ramgopal Verma and SRK to perform an international drug heist, albeit without getting caught.
I was quite worried about how I would get all these people together in the first place. Making them do an international drug heist without getting caught was an altogether different issue. But my professor told me just one thing, which I think is going to be my mantra for life;
He said, “Nikhil, 5 people, no matter how different they are, can always come together and do any damn thing you want them to do… you know why?”
I threw an I-am-so-frustrated-I-can’t-think glance at him.
Understanding my glance to the T, he smiled and took a swig of his coffee, he said, “Because you are a writer… and you are fuckin good one.”
Raising my mug of coffee in anticipation to the words of praise, I took just the bit of it that I had to take, “I was a writer… and I could make my characters do whatever I wanted them to.”
When people say something, a bit of it is the truth, the other bit is what ‘can be’ the truth. The same thing applied to my professor’s sentence. Some of it was true; some of it could be true.
Coffee break was over, Thinking about the 5 characters exercise, playing with Hasse’s cap, much to her annoyance, we walked in the lobby, Nicolas gleefully flashing his card at the door to let us in, the Sin City poster greeted us and we walked up the staircase towards the 100 capacity theatre, 15 days after we had first had entered it.
Splashing water with my Nike shoes, I remember running towards the school, the raindrops bouncing off my red windcheater. “I am 22 and am going back to school”, I laughed at the contradiction, running as fast as I could, ensuring that I didn’t get late for the 9 a.m. reporting time. I reached the school, breathing heavily, I bent down to look at the school building through the old-tree-arch, could see a couple of Japanese students sipping coffee standing outside, another student, perhaps an Australian smoking. Wiping a bit of water of my hair with the back of my hand, pulling my wet hair back, taking the jacket off, I walked through the pathway, smiling at the three, who obligingly smiled back. They asked me if I was a first tier student, to which I said yes, introducing them to me and vice versa, one of them flashed his card at the door, unlocking it and letting me in.
As I entered, I could see a flock of equally nervous students sitting around the lounge area, some making coffee, some reading newspapers, some looking here n there and some just looking at me, perhaps because I was the latest entry in the lot. Smiling at whoever I liked on instinct, I found myself a place on a couch, right under the Sin City poster. I turned back and was looking at it when I could feel a cold hand on my shoulder. I turned back to see the cutest girl I had ever seen, correction: the second cutest girl I had ever seen, a mop of curly blonde hair on her small, squarish round face, a smile that illuminated the entire room, in a blue-black striped T-Shirt and a pair of denims quite same to the shade I was wearing. I looked at her, almost breaking into a 400 watt smile, inspired because of her equally powerful smile, before I could speak, she spoke.
“Heeeylo!!! I am Hasse, from Holland”. She smiled again, the moment the sentence was over.
“Hi”, I said, still pondering over how she could smile so genuinely, “I am Nikhil, from India”
“Oh!” she smiled, wider this time, “It’s colder in India, aint it?”
“Not at this time of the year”, I said matter of factly, “It’s quite warmer and nicer”.
“Is it?” she enquired, charged full on with curiosity, “Even Holland has better weather…” she sounded terribly homesick for those two split seconds.
Before I could say anything, we were asked to come up to the theatre space for our induction. Hasse and I started walking upstairs, the others following us. I knew at that moment that Dutch people are extremely warm and friendly. What I didn’t know then was that one of them was going to be one of my best friends and that too, for a lifetime.
TO BE CONTINUED
Friday, April 6, 2007
Letters from Sydney: Episode 2
Hi all,
Thanks so much for the amazing response to the first letter!
You guys have me all pepped up...
Anyways as promised here's letter number 2.
Its a bit heavy and philosophical.
Bear With Me.
Enjoy!
For those of you who came late, please read part 1 before going on to part 2. It would help. :-)
And yes... keep kommenting!
It was my first Sunday in Sydney. I felt a slight bit of jet lag as I slept almost throughout the day, waking up only once to go shopping with David. We had gone to Woolworths, one of the chain of supermarkets in Australia. Woolworths is to Australia what Spencers is to India. A chain of huge, huge stores spread all over the land down under it is second only to Coles, another successful mall chain here.
Very frankly, Australia is not a visually spectacular nation. It’s very beautiful and clean and hygienic, but it is nothing that India is not. If Spencers had had green colored cloth bags to pack the bought goods in, it would have been exactly like Woolworths is. The cost of things varies, definitely, soft-drinks, meat and dairy products being way cheaper than they are in India, that’s a result of the sound financial state of this country more than anything else.
I had my first taste of the infamous Sydney sun whilst David and I walked back to 66-A, three very heavy green bags in our four hands. The mercury was at a mere 30 degrees, but our skins were burning, literally. We both cursed David for not remembering to apply sunscreen before stepping out. The ten minute walk seemed like ages, both of us praying that we reach home, soon.
As I lay in my bed an hour later, I was looking up at the ceiling fan as it slowly rotated above me, reminding me of my room in the Pune home, something that I attribute half of my life’s achievements, whatever bit of them I have had, to. What I am today, what I am doing today, what I would do tomorrow and what I will be tomorrow would always be credited to that room, where I wrote everything like it was the last thing I could ever write. People thought that I was schizophrenic, leading a dual life, one inside that room and the other outside it. I think they were right; I am in Sydney today, because I was in that room few months back for a few seemingly, very, very inconsequential but highly effective in actuality years. I am in The International Film School of Sydney today because I was in Pune for the last 4 years. Otherwise, I pretty much can assure you that I would have been working at someplace like Infosys, typing nonetheless; Software Codes for people I know exist but I know I would never meet.
All I know now is that I was destined to type my life away. What I type now makes me one of the people who believe that destiny is what we do to life.
What I could’ve ended up typing would’ve given me a chance to be one of the many people who believe that destiny is what life does to us.
I woke up with a start, my eyes opened to a crimson red stream of light coming in through the slightly open curtains of my room. I unfurled the curtains and what was in front of me is easily the best sights I have ever seen. The sun was setting, through a couple of clouds, right at the end of the road right in front of my window. Though the sun was hidden behind the clouds, a bit of it managed to raise itself out from a li’l gap between the clouds, making everything in the immediate vicinity glow, like the ring from Peter Jackson’s famous movie. In one word, it was magnificent.
With my mouth wide open in awe of nature’s unbelievable spectacle, I scampered about the room trying to look for my camera, fiddling with my bags, falling over shoes which I never keep in the right place, struggling with almost every non-living entity in my small room. I finally found my camera in the most obvious place, which I had obviously failed to check, rushed to the window and switched the camera on, looked intently at the LCD only to realize that it was out of battery. Cursing myself for not being able to capture the moment, I turned back and looked at my watch which was showing 6:00 P.M. Mentally calculating the time in India, messing it up a couple of times I finally deduced that it would be 12:30 there.
“She would be in the bus” I thought. “Waiting at the bus stop, rather” I corrected the thought I had first thought of.
Getting into my white shirt and pair of blue jeans, haphazardly setting my hair (!!!) I ran down the staircase to see Natalie brushing Sac.
“That’s quite a smile… you seem to be very happy. Had your girlfriend called?” she asked me, brushing flies off Sac’s back, much to his discomfort.
“I don’t have a girlfriend, Natalie”, I told her, and still trying to figure out the reason why I was smiling, then trying to figure out why I was unable to understand that I was actually, smiling.
I then walked past a couple of shops along the road that links Dalmeny Avenue to Rosebery Avenue, enjoying the cool wind that swept across wildly, taking alongwith it, helpless leaves fallen off trees, by both the sides of the jet black-colored, clean and spotless road, a Chinese couple walking hand-in-hand on the other side of it, an old lady mowing the lawn in her tiny, but beautiful duplex, another man riding his silver-black bicycle, humming Justin Timberlake’s ‘What goes round, comes around’ and smiling every time he went out of tune.
This is one of the things which make Australia addictive. People love to live. Their lives are not always plagued with worries about small things, they aren’t always screaming, shouting at each other, everyone likes everyone unless someone gives you a reason to dislike them. Everything is warm. People go out of their way to make you comfortable, they smile, they sing, they laugh, they giggle, they dance. There are so many people, coming from different countries, different cultures and different religions. Everyone tries to blend in the melting pot of combined ethnicities, smiling at others, trying to say goodbye to a Spanish friend by saying adios, saying hi to me by saying a broken, but effectively sweet Namaste.
As I reached Rosebery Avenue after a brief 2 minutes walk from my place, it was almost dark, with very little sunlight left. After crossing number 23, my heartbeat started to rise, with 24, I could feel a slight thump in my chest, at 25 I closed my eyes, at 26 I stopped and took a deep breath, making sure I wasn’t looking ahead, my head purposefully down and then I took the 10 most scared steps in my life, a overabundance of thoughts taking over my brain in the next 60 seconds.
“What if it’s really small?”
“What if it isn’t good?”
“Why the f*** did I not see it before coming?”
“I should’ve seen it before leaving India”
“Oh shit, Oh shit, Oh shit”
“It’s too much of money at stake, it better be good”
At the 10th step I opened my eyes. Took another breath. Sighed, slightly and turned my neck to its left, at 27, Rosebery Avenue. The place that’s called ‘The International Film School of Sydney’ I couldn’t see much but the color and the rough shape of the building. It seemed purple, a few Japanese wooden boxes spaced around the patio of the not –so-huge building. A few obscure looking wooden bars, almost 9 ft. tall were erected all along the 20 feet cemented walkway to the entrance of the school. A huge, bended and old tree formed the natural archway to the building. I walked towards it, some bits of the insides of the school visible through the small glass entrance door. It was brightly lit, like a studio. A poster of Robert Rodriguez’ Sin City gracing the front wall of the lobby, whatever bit of it was visible from the outside.
I stood there, almost magnetized. I knew that I had taken the right decision. It wasn’t fancy, It wasn’t palatial. It just seemed so right. It just seemed so cinematic.
The thing about Cinema which makes it so appealing to me is that it’s not like people. When you love a film, the film loves you too. When you love people, they don’t always say they love you too. The best thing about life is not when you love someone with all your heart and they love you too. It’s when you just tell each other that you do. That’s the best thing. That’s life.
“What do we achieve by telling people that we love them?” you would ask.
Maybe nothing, but if you don’t tell them, you are bound to lose out on something.
I had fallen in love with The International Film School of Sydney at the first sight, in slight sunlight and a bit of moonlight. What I didn’t know then was, just in a matter of few days, It was going to love me too.
TO BE CONTINUED
Thanks so much for the amazing response to the first letter!
You guys have me all pepped up...
Anyways as promised here's letter number 2.
Its a bit heavy and philosophical.
Bear With Me.
Enjoy!
For those of you who came late, please read part 1 before going on to part 2. It would help. :-)
And yes... keep kommenting!
It was my first Sunday in Sydney. I felt a slight bit of jet lag as I slept almost throughout the day, waking up only once to go shopping with David. We had gone to Woolworths, one of the chain of supermarkets in Australia. Woolworths is to Australia what Spencers is to India. A chain of huge, huge stores spread all over the land down under it is second only to Coles, another successful mall chain here.
Very frankly, Australia is not a visually spectacular nation. It’s very beautiful and clean and hygienic, but it is nothing that India is not. If Spencers had had green colored cloth bags to pack the bought goods in, it would have been exactly like Woolworths is. The cost of things varies, definitely, soft-drinks, meat and dairy products being way cheaper than they are in India, that’s a result of the sound financial state of this country more than anything else.
I had my first taste of the infamous Sydney sun whilst David and I walked back to 66-A, three very heavy green bags in our four hands. The mercury was at a mere 30 degrees, but our skins were burning, literally. We both cursed David for not remembering to apply sunscreen before stepping out. The ten minute walk seemed like ages, both of us praying that we reach home, soon.
As I lay in my bed an hour later, I was looking up at the ceiling fan as it slowly rotated above me, reminding me of my room in the Pune home, something that I attribute half of my life’s achievements, whatever bit of them I have had, to. What I am today, what I am doing today, what I would do tomorrow and what I will be tomorrow would always be credited to that room, where I wrote everything like it was the last thing I could ever write. People thought that I was schizophrenic, leading a dual life, one inside that room and the other outside it. I think they were right; I am in Sydney today, because I was in that room few months back for a few seemingly, very, very inconsequential but highly effective in actuality years. I am in The International Film School of Sydney today because I was in Pune for the last 4 years. Otherwise, I pretty much can assure you that I would have been working at someplace like Infosys, typing nonetheless; Software Codes for people I know exist but I know I would never meet.
All I know now is that I was destined to type my life away. What I type now makes me one of the people who believe that destiny is what we do to life.
What I could’ve ended up typing would’ve given me a chance to be one of the many people who believe that destiny is what life does to us.
I woke up with a start, my eyes opened to a crimson red stream of light coming in through the slightly open curtains of my room. I unfurled the curtains and what was in front of me is easily the best sights I have ever seen. The sun was setting, through a couple of clouds, right at the end of the road right in front of my window. Though the sun was hidden behind the clouds, a bit of it managed to raise itself out from a li’l gap between the clouds, making everything in the immediate vicinity glow, like the ring from Peter Jackson’s famous movie. In one word, it was magnificent.
With my mouth wide open in awe of nature’s unbelievable spectacle, I scampered about the room trying to look for my camera, fiddling with my bags, falling over shoes which I never keep in the right place, struggling with almost every non-living entity in my small room. I finally found my camera in the most obvious place, which I had obviously failed to check, rushed to the window and switched the camera on, looked intently at the LCD only to realize that it was out of battery. Cursing myself for not being able to capture the moment, I turned back and looked at my watch which was showing 6:00 P.M. Mentally calculating the time in India, messing it up a couple of times I finally deduced that it would be 12:30 there.
“She would be in the bus” I thought. “Waiting at the bus stop, rather” I corrected the thought I had first thought of.
Getting into my white shirt and pair of blue jeans, haphazardly setting my hair (!!!) I ran down the staircase to see Natalie brushing Sac.
“That’s quite a smile… you seem to be very happy. Had your girlfriend called?” she asked me, brushing flies off Sac’s back, much to his discomfort.
“I don’t have a girlfriend, Natalie”, I told her, and still trying to figure out the reason why I was smiling, then trying to figure out why I was unable to understand that I was actually, smiling.
I then walked past a couple of shops along the road that links Dalmeny Avenue to Rosebery Avenue, enjoying the cool wind that swept across wildly, taking alongwith it, helpless leaves fallen off trees, by both the sides of the jet black-colored, clean and spotless road, a Chinese couple walking hand-in-hand on the other side of it, an old lady mowing the lawn in her tiny, but beautiful duplex, another man riding his silver-black bicycle, humming Justin Timberlake’s ‘What goes round, comes around’ and smiling every time he went out of tune.
This is one of the things which make Australia addictive. People love to live. Their lives are not always plagued with worries about small things, they aren’t always screaming, shouting at each other, everyone likes everyone unless someone gives you a reason to dislike them. Everything is warm. People go out of their way to make you comfortable, they smile, they sing, they laugh, they giggle, they dance. There are so many people, coming from different countries, different cultures and different religions. Everyone tries to blend in the melting pot of combined ethnicities, smiling at others, trying to say goodbye to a Spanish friend by saying adios, saying hi to me by saying a broken, but effectively sweet Namaste.
As I reached Rosebery Avenue after a brief 2 minutes walk from my place, it was almost dark, with very little sunlight left. After crossing number 23, my heartbeat started to rise, with 24, I could feel a slight thump in my chest, at 25 I closed my eyes, at 26 I stopped and took a deep breath, making sure I wasn’t looking ahead, my head purposefully down and then I took the 10 most scared steps in my life, a overabundance of thoughts taking over my brain in the next 60 seconds.
“What if it’s really small?”
“What if it isn’t good?”
“Why the f*** did I not see it before coming?”
“I should’ve seen it before leaving India”
“Oh shit, Oh shit, Oh shit”
“It’s too much of money at stake, it better be good”
At the 10th step I opened my eyes. Took another breath. Sighed, slightly and turned my neck to its left, at 27, Rosebery Avenue. The place that’s called ‘The International Film School of Sydney’ I couldn’t see much but the color and the rough shape of the building. It seemed purple, a few Japanese wooden boxes spaced around the patio of the not –so-huge building. A few obscure looking wooden bars, almost 9 ft. tall were erected all along the 20 feet cemented walkway to the entrance of the school. A huge, bended and old tree formed the natural archway to the building. I walked towards it, some bits of the insides of the school visible through the small glass entrance door. It was brightly lit, like a studio. A poster of Robert Rodriguez’ Sin City gracing the front wall of the lobby, whatever bit of it was visible from the outside.
I stood there, almost magnetized. I knew that I had taken the right decision. It wasn’t fancy, It wasn’t palatial. It just seemed so right. It just seemed so cinematic.
The thing about Cinema which makes it so appealing to me is that it’s not like people. When you love a film, the film loves you too. When you love people, they don’t always say they love you too. The best thing about life is not when you love someone with all your heart and they love you too. It’s when you just tell each other that you do. That’s the best thing. That’s life.
“What do we achieve by telling people that we love them?” you would ask.
Maybe nothing, but if you don’t tell them, you are bound to lose out on something.
I had fallen in love with The International Film School of Sydney at the first sight, in slight sunlight and a bit of moonlight. What I didn’t know then was, just in a matter of few days, It was going to love me too.
TO BE CONTINUED
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Letters from Sydney: Episode 1
Hello All!
Apologies to begin with, I am a tad too late with my accounts of the Sydney trip. As I got down to writing what and how my Sydney trip is faring I realized that the email was turning quickly into a novelish form... Cant help being a writer. So, what was meant to be one small email, turned out into 40 pages of a short novel. So i thought I would rather blog about my experiences, making this into a 10 part series.
This is the first letter from my 10 letters from Sydney.
Letters from Sydney
Episode 1:
Here I am sitting at my apartment, 66-A, Dalmeny Avenue, Rosebery, Sydney, NSW. What can be my address for the next 2 years is a very, very warm and cozy place. Owned by a 30ish Natalie Courtier, 66-A is a duplex, with a living room and kitchen taking up the ground floor, we, (David, Natalie, Sac and I) live on the first floor.
Natalie is a single mom. Caring, Helpful and lively with a brilliant sense of humor, she is just like most other Australians are. Always offering me what she has ‘managed’ to cook and dropping me to the supermarket in her beetlesque pink car, she is just the kind of person one would need to be with in the first, crucial week overseas.
David is the guy who has rented the second room. He landed in Sydney a week earlier than me and is here for 5 months to learn, well, English. He is a 6 ft. tall Columbian, speaks English as broken as broken can be, with spattering of Spanish, hoping, rather considering that Natalie and I understand each and every bit of it. David is the one who didn’t let me feel homesick, walking me through the neighborhood, helping me unpack and when the unpacking was not-so-nice, helping me pack again. Explaining to me the way traffic functions, how people in Sydney are reckless drivers n et al.
“Do you have a girlfriend back home..?” He asked me one day, out of the blue.
“No” I said, a little confused about what made him bring up the topic so suddenly.
“Oh!” David sighed, sympathizing with me like I had lost something of the magnitude of the battle of Troy, “I have a girlfriend in Columbia” he finished, rather sadly.
“That’s nice” I said, thinking that it would comfort him.
“Its not, really” he said, extremely pensively, looking down the wooden staircase, on which we were sitting. “I miss her. And. She misses me too.”
That did it. I knew that David had accepted me as a friend. When people tell us about their love lives, they just like us. When people tell us about the tragedies of their love lives, they trust us.
Apart from Natalie and David, the third mate in the house is Sac. A cute li’l white dog, Sac decided to like me right on the moment I stepped in the house with three very heavy suitcases almost at 7:30 p.m, Sydney time, on the 3rd of March 2007.
My Australian Voyage started on a tad negative note, with my flight being delayed for 3 hrs, and my luggage going overweight. But then those hours gave me a chance to talk on the phone, to friends, family, etc. That I couldn’t speak to more than one persons is a different story. That somewhere, deep inside, I didn’t want to speak to anyone else is a different story as well.
The flight, Qantas 124 was a very nice one. My first experience of a take off and a landing went quite smooth and I enjoyed the entire feel of it, not feeling any of the flight syndromes that I was made aware of a trillion times by a zillion people. I felt a weird combination of euphoria and sadness when I saw Bombay from the sky, the lights forming a kaleidoscope of the dream city. It’s kind of strange; I was going to one city for 2 crucial years of my life so that I could comfortably live in another for the rest of my life.
“I am going to own this city one day”, I said to myself as the flight zoomed ahead, leaving behind a trail of Bombay lights.
The thought just transported me to a dream I had once seen. I was standing at Worli sea face, wearing a white shirt and a pair of blue denims. I must be a bit older than what I am now. Standing besides me was someone, wearing a blue-pink dress. It was raining, rather, drizzling steadily, the drops of water jumping off the roof of a black Skoda Superb parked right besides where we were standing.
“I am going to own this city one day”, I said looking at the vast expense of Bombay in front of my eyes.
“You already do”, she said, smiling and then holding my hand. I could feel the touch of the diamond she was wearing in her finger. We then just looked at each other and laughed our hearts out. She always laughed for no apparent reason. This time, maybe she cracked a genuinely funny joke.
Dreams always say something, someone had once told me. I don’t know what this dream meant, but I would seriously like to know. A dream consists of a figment of fiction and figment of reality. It’s when the two figments are the same, that’s when dreams come true.
I was so fast asleep that I didn’t understand when I was thousand of miles from the place I called home. The flight QF 124, landed at the Sydney airport at the scheduled time which was 5 p.m. Sydney time.
I got through the customs with no problems at all. I was awed by the beauty of the Sydney Airport. Walking through terminal 2, I was just thinking about the whale of difference between Bombay and Sydney airports, the way people spoke, the way everybody spoke and interacted with each other. The number of smiles I exchanged with strangers at the Sydney airport in those 20 minutes was easily equal to the number of stranger smiles I had exchanged in the whole of India in 20 years. Somehow, I wasn’t feeling homesick. I was feeling terrifically at home, as I walked towards the cab, to head on towards a place I was going to call home for the next two years, 66-A, Dalmeny Avenue, Rosebery, Sydney, NSW.
To be continued
I sincerely hope my writing hasnt lost whatever bit of flair it had, have written something after a long, long time. Hope I was successful in keeping you guys engaged and give you a first person's view of my first few days in Sydney.
I would make an effort to update this blog every saturday. So all those of you who didnt leave part 1 midway can come back next saturday to check out more of these letters from Sydney.
Coming up next week: The International Film School of Sydney, I miss home everytime I see an aeroplane, Dip Insight and What happened when a set came crashing down....
This and more... only in My letters from Sydney.
Apologies to begin with, I am a tad too late with my accounts of the Sydney trip. As I got down to writing what and how my Sydney trip is faring I realized that the email was turning quickly into a novelish form... Cant help being a writer. So, what was meant to be one small email, turned out into 40 pages of a short novel. So i thought I would rather blog about my experiences, making this into a 10 part series.
This is the first letter from my 10 letters from Sydney.
Letters from Sydney
Episode 1:
Here I am sitting at my apartment, 66-A, Dalmeny Avenue, Rosebery, Sydney, NSW. What can be my address for the next 2 years is a very, very warm and cozy place. Owned by a 30ish Natalie Courtier, 66-A is a duplex, with a living room and kitchen taking up the ground floor, we, (David, Natalie, Sac and I) live on the first floor.
Natalie is a single mom. Caring, Helpful and lively with a brilliant sense of humor, she is just like most other Australians are. Always offering me what she has ‘managed’ to cook and dropping me to the supermarket in her beetlesque pink car, she is just the kind of person one would need to be with in the first, crucial week overseas.
David is the guy who has rented the second room. He landed in Sydney a week earlier than me and is here for 5 months to learn, well, English. He is a 6 ft. tall Columbian, speaks English as broken as broken can be, with spattering of Spanish, hoping, rather considering that Natalie and I understand each and every bit of it. David is the one who didn’t let me feel homesick, walking me through the neighborhood, helping me unpack and when the unpacking was not-so-nice, helping me pack again. Explaining to me the way traffic functions, how people in Sydney are reckless drivers n et al.
“Do you have a girlfriend back home..?” He asked me one day, out of the blue.
“No” I said, a little confused about what made him bring up the topic so suddenly.
“Oh!” David sighed, sympathizing with me like I had lost something of the magnitude of the battle of Troy, “I have a girlfriend in Columbia” he finished, rather sadly.
“That’s nice” I said, thinking that it would comfort him.
“Its not, really” he said, extremely pensively, looking down the wooden staircase, on which we were sitting. “I miss her. And. She misses me too.”
That did it. I knew that David had accepted me as a friend. When people tell us about their love lives, they just like us. When people tell us about the tragedies of their love lives, they trust us.
Apart from Natalie and David, the third mate in the house is Sac. A cute li’l white dog, Sac decided to like me right on the moment I stepped in the house with three very heavy suitcases almost at 7:30 p.m, Sydney time, on the 3rd of March 2007.
My Australian Voyage started on a tad negative note, with my flight being delayed for 3 hrs, and my luggage going overweight. But then those hours gave me a chance to talk on the phone, to friends, family, etc. That I couldn’t speak to more than one persons is a different story. That somewhere, deep inside, I didn’t want to speak to anyone else is a different story as well.
The flight, Qantas 124 was a very nice one. My first experience of a take off and a landing went quite smooth and I enjoyed the entire feel of it, not feeling any of the flight syndromes that I was made aware of a trillion times by a zillion people. I felt a weird combination of euphoria and sadness when I saw Bombay from the sky, the lights forming a kaleidoscope of the dream city. It’s kind of strange; I was going to one city for 2 crucial years of my life so that I could comfortably live in another for the rest of my life.
“I am going to own this city one day”, I said to myself as the flight zoomed ahead, leaving behind a trail of Bombay lights.
The thought just transported me to a dream I had once seen. I was standing at Worli sea face, wearing a white shirt and a pair of blue denims. I must be a bit older than what I am now. Standing besides me was someone, wearing a blue-pink dress. It was raining, rather, drizzling steadily, the drops of water jumping off the roof of a black Skoda Superb parked right besides where we were standing.
“I am going to own this city one day”, I said looking at the vast expense of Bombay in front of my eyes.
“You already do”, she said, smiling and then holding my hand. I could feel the touch of the diamond she was wearing in her finger. We then just looked at each other and laughed our hearts out. She always laughed for no apparent reason. This time, maybe she cracked a genuinely funny joke.
Dreams always say something, someone had once told me. I don’t know what this dream meant, but I would seriously like to know. A dream consists of a figment of fiction and figment of reality. It’s when the two figments are the same, that’s when dreams come true.
I was so fast asleep that I didn’t understand when I was thousand of miles from the place I called home. The flight QF 124, landed at the Sydney airport at the scheduled time which was 5 p.m. Sydney time.
I got through the customs with no problems at all. I was awed by the beauty of the Sydney Airport. Walking through terminal 2, I was just thinking about the whale of difference between Bombay and Sydney airports, the way people spoke, the way everybody spoke and interacted with each other. The number of smiles I exchanged with strangers at the Sydney airport in those 20 minutes was easily equal to the number of stranger smiles I had exchanged in the whole of India in 20 years. Somehow, I wasn’t feeling homesick. I was feeling terrifically at home, as I walked towards the cab, to head on towards a place I was going to call home for the next two years, 66-A, Dalmeny Avenue, Rosebery, Sydney, NSW.
To be continued
I sincerely hope my writing hasnt lost whatever bit of flair it had, have written something after a long, long time. Hope I was successful in keeping you guys engaged and give you a first person's view of my first few days in Sydney.
I would make an effort to update this blog every saturday. So all those of you who didnt leave part 1 midway can come back next saturday to check out more of these letters from Sydney.
Coming up next week: The International Film School of Sydney, I miss home everytime I see an aeroplane, Dip Insight and What happened when a set came crashing down....
This and more... only in My letters from Sydney.
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